


Take What You Need (And You Leave the Rest)

by ishie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Ahch-To, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 14:11:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8404666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: You can't raise a man back up when he's in defeat.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> Title from "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band, which Luke Skrawalker absolutely would not be obsessed with in a modern AU. Nope.
> 
> (My EU days are long ago and far, far away, so apologies for any canonicity I've screwed up!)

The girl burned with light.

Her brightness should have been a balm. There was sunlight aplenty on this salted rock, but it was thin and cold. In all the lives he'd had among the stars, he had never fully inured himself to wind and damp. There was too much of Tattooine in him.

But, this girl... When she sent the first tentative prods at his mind, he rebuffed her without thought. Was it an impulse, or something she learned?

He watched her fight to keep her emotions in check. Even without the Force he was able to read her thoughts as easily as a nav chart. How many of them had he shared? Her loneliness, sanded down at the edges until it was only a shadow of its former pain. Her rage, her sorrow, her longing. All of it, tinged with that star-bright warmth that made something within him want to thaw.

Luke steeled himself against it. He could feel the shadows that skittered over that shining core of her. Feel where she was weakest, where the dark already sought a foothold. 

Her anger was great. Her grief, like his, was far greater. 

She was suffused with light, yes, but given the chance it would burn hot enough to consume them both. Luke did not think he would survive such a fate a second time. He had already given so much.

"Will you take it?" 

Her arm was steady and her voice was low. A hint of impatience leaked through, but no more. Though he had kept her waiting a ridiculous amount of time already, struggling to keep his own feelings under control, she seemed ready — eager — to wait longer.

Luke relented and halved the distance between them. His fingers clicked around the hilt of the saber she offered. The buzz of nanorotors above his wrist was a low complement to the squeal of metal on metal, barely audible above the crash of the waves below. 

Unthinking, Luke lifted his other hand to trace a ribbon of carbon scoring with one fingertip. 

_— groaning, screaming, flashes of snow, of blood, gargantuan darkness and the two minuscule flames within it, both flickering, one fading and the other racing forward as if to engulf it —_

The girl flinched, or he imagined she did. Luke sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, pushing the images along with it. He could not see this. He would not. 

There were dozens of questions he could ask, but he did not trust his voice. 

His was not a silent exile. He had never been able to hold his tongue. He spoke to the air, to the rocks and stones, to the mossy tumbledown sweep of his home. But that was a different thing. That was speaking not to be heard but to fill the empty expanse, to weave himself into the sounds as though he belonged here. To defy the things that brought him here. To pretend as if his life were an integral piece of the tapestry here, and not a last desperate chance. A last hope.

Luke did not trust his voice to ask questions to which he could not hear the answers. He didn't trust it enough to try explaining what he still could not fathom.

The girl's expression hardened further, but her eyes stayed as soft as shadows.

"General Organa — _Leia_ , your sister, she —"

Luke turned and let the wind carry her words away. 

 

 

 

When the girl gave up her pleading, left off her bargaining, Luke watched her run down to the Falcon. He held his breath a few times, strained against the impulse to steady her steps, but soon she took the last leap down onto the makeshift landing pad. She stalked up the ramp, hands balled at her side and her shoulders still high with irritation.

He gave her a few moments more, then followed.

From a distance, the ship looked as he remembered it. Mostly. Closer up he recognized some of the repairs that he'd completed with his own hands. Others were newer, still raw, and so awkwardly done he could only imagine the horror on Han's face when he saw them. If there had been time.

Artoo warbled and rocked when Luke stepped down onto the flat rock.

Chewbacca emerged moments later, walking slowly and laying a large hand on Artoo's dome. No bounding forward to meet Luke as he might have done once. No long-legged stride eating the distance between them. No ropy, hairy arms engulfing him or ruffling his hair, elbowing Han aside in jest.

They considered each other for a long moment. Luke kept his hands folded behind his back and Chewbacca plucked idly at the flap of his satchel. Artoo's eye swiveled from one to the other. 

<He would have come himself.>

Luke did his old friends the honor of not masking his tears. "I would have turned him away, too."

Chewbacca shrugged and gave a mournful sound. His long fingers played over his satchel, even hitching the strap higher. It had always been impossible for Luke to read his moods — until he pressed the Wookiee too far. 

"Will you go to Kashyyyk?"

<If she has no need of me.>

The girl would have need of many things once she let her disappointment subside. Perhaps she would let Chewbacca salve some of his mourning in helping her.

"Of course. Will you take Artoo back to my sister?"

Artoo squealed in outrage. 

"Calm down. I'm not as useless as you think," Luke told the droid. "Leia needs you more than I do. And don't think I've forgotten your habit of taking unexpected swims."

Only Artoo could make a whistle sound so skeptical.

<Your sister...>

Luke let the grief well up, let it choke him, let it turn his face red. Chewbacca bit back the rest of his admonishment. 

"When it's finished," Luke promised. A lie he would never regret. "When it's done."

 

 

 

It was fully dark by the time Luke heard engines whine to life. He ducked out the entrance of his shelter, hand up to keep the stinging rain off his face. The familiar shape of the Falcon flung itself upward. It was all effort, no elegance or grace to the movement. He didn't wait to see it streak toward the upper atmosphere.

There had been enough goodbyes.

Luke returned to his dinner and tried to settle back into the familiar ebbs and flows of the island. The girl was still a spiky burr of energy on the edge of his consciousness, needling him just enough to remind him of her existence. There was no elegance or grace to her, either. 

The next morning, he rose early. Chewie told him the map to Ahch-To had been displayed openly in the Resistance base, which meant it was only a matter of time before others found him.

Ben's wounds — his heart ached at the thought — would not hold him back for long.

After eating, Luke picked up where he had left off the previous day. His legs still burned from the long climb, but he pulled on his heavy robe and stepped out into the mist.

There were dozens of things he needed to do. The coldest cycle of the year would soon be upon the archipelago, when rain lashed the islands and the seas rose. It would also bring masses of nesting birds, which followed the many species of fish that spawned in the largest cove. The traps he'd set would be destroyed if he didn't reset them soon. He needed to check on the rest of his supplies, too. Most would need moved to higher ground, or deeper into the network of tunnels under the old temple where they were still watertight. 

Then there were the new tasks he'd set for himself. His grief built more every day, with nowhere to go. He had grown sloppy, letting the long years of anticipation grind him down. If — when — his nephew came, however he came, Luke had no illusions about how long he would last against the onslaught. How had he ever had the energy to defy the Emperor? To fight Vader, to coax Anakin out of the darkness? 

Well, it had been more than half a lifetime ago, for a start. 

He was giving himself only a little help from the Force to climb the last rise back to his shelter, when he realized something:

The girl. 

By now she should have been one among many, those sparks of awareness as distant as the stars in the night sky. But her brightness was no less diminished in the full day since he'd seen the Millennium Falcon leave. Luke had the sensation that if he turned his head fast enough, he'd find her creeping along behind him.

He stopped dead halfway up the last set of steps and turned in a circle. Pebbles skittered underfoot. Above, two birds squawked greetings. 

Luke concentrated. Closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and reaching out through the Force, he _pushed_.

More skittering pebbles, this time from a cave farther up the slope to his left, and a loud "Hey!"

No bird, that.

 

 

 

The island was a far less peaceful place with the girl on it.

Everywhere Luke turned, it seemed, even in sleep, there she was. She ran up and down the hills, taking steps two at at time, sliding downward with a muffled curse when the moss made her footsteps unsteady. He heard her chipping away at rock somewhere deep within the hills. Found her stacking large stones into top-heavy columns, then knocking them down with her staff. Once, he looked up from the traps in the cove to find Rey dangling halfway down the sheer cliff face.

She waved when she saw him.

It was years since he'd last spoken with Yoda, in any form. Longer still since he felt any guilt over that headstrong brat who crashed into the swamp and whined through weeks of training, but Luke offered up an apology to him now.

He had just settled into his favored meditation stance when Rey came trudging up the path from the far side of the island. Two fat birds, already plucked, dangled from a string slung over her shoulders. Her arms were covered in scratches and welts, and a long smear of brown blood stained her tunic.

"Don't mind me!" she called. "Just supplementing my rations a bit."

She disappeared into her shelter, and Luke closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in the waves that surrounded him. The sound of those crashing against the shore below, and the unseen ones that wove through all living things on the planet. Within moments, he was submerged in them, floating somewhere below the surface of himself, letting the world flow through him.

In this state, he could feel Rey with much greater specificity. She wrestled with something and tried not to let her anger rise. She wasn't successful.

Luke wasn't normally so attuned to her; for all the legends about Jedi mind powers, they were relatively tame in reality. He could read moods if he found the right connection, but he was still far better at reading body language, in those species that had recognizable forms of it. One thing he couldn't do was read minds. He'd never found a reason to want to learn how. 

Vader had been skilled in the practice. Interrogation, as he called it. Torture was Luke's word for it. Ripping into someone's memories, tearing up their imagination, rifling through their dreams. Even the memory of it turned Luke's stomach. 

Far easier was reading whatever strong emotions were being broadcast directly at him, even when they didn't mean to.

Self-censoring would likely never be one of the girl's strengths. She thought herself impassive; that was clear from how hard she struggled to keep her face expressionless. But though she occasionally achieved it, she couldn't stop beaming her state of mind in all directions at full volume. If he were to teach her, take her as his apprentice—

But, of course, he wouldn't.

With some effort, Luke turned his attention away from Rey. He cast out farther, searching for a current that would take him far from the island. Something brushed against the edges of his senses: soft and massive, and familiar, too. A welcome change from Rey's spiky energy.

He knew this presence. It was one of a group of animals that were something like water-dwelling purrgils, as large as a freighter. He had seen them once in the flesh, a full pod of them, driving their thick heads and tapered bodies above the waves during the warm cycles. Like the birds, they followed the vast swarms of fish, though they gave his shore a wider berth. At least, he thought that was their usual behavior. They didn't seem to shy from him in meditation, but that didn't mean he hadn't upset their patterns or that something else kept them away.

Luke pulled back before he disrupted their activity and found that a light rain had blown in. His hair and robes were damp to the touch. At the lower edge of his vision, tiny droplets shone in his beard, catching the watery sunlight and sending it back in prismatic shards.

"Keeps you warm, does it?" Rey sat several feet away, clutching a rough bowl close to her face. She slurped at whatever it held and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before gesturing at her chin. "I always wanted one. Good for hiding who you are, too, I'd bet."

Luke barely resisted the urge to wipe his own face. "Sometimes."

"Doesn't seem like it works on yourself, though. Shame." 

She busied herself with sweeping the last bits of food out of the bowl with her fingers. 

Luke chose to pretend she hadn't spoken.

 

 

 

It wasn't until the third week that Luke realized the girl wasn't waiting for a ride home. She seemed equally unlikely to be trying to win him to her cause, whatever it was, given her lack of effort in convincing him of anything at all.

(Whether she was waiting instead for Leia to swoop in with a phalanx of Resistance techs and demand things he wasn't prepared to give was another story.)

She worried at his consciousness all through the morning. A ceaseless irritation, but an idle one, no purpose to it. It was entirely his awareness of her that drove it, nothing she was doing on her own. But little by little the grit of his curiosity became a huge pearl he could no longer ignore.

He found Rey in the cliffs above the cove. Wrist-deep in one of his salt barrels, she was surrounded by guts and bones. At the edge of the path she had cleared the grass and laid long sticks over the dirt. Atop the sticks were reed baskets, each with a lid carefully secured with a loop of braided grass. An open one sat next to the salt barrel; another, overturned, made the table where the cleaned fish lay in a sloppy mound.

"You were low," she said. Her hands kept moving, arranging the pale blue steaks in an even layer then covering them with salt. Again, and another, careful to pack the fish tightly, turning the basket this way and that until it was full.

Luke's stores were well-hidden, deep in the bowels of the tunnels. If she found these supplies, what else had she seen? He should have felt her reaching through the darkness, feeling her way around the obstacles he'd left. The few glimpses he'd had of her abilities — beyond the searing burn of her potential — made him think her a rank amateur. Surely he hadn't misread her so much.

Rey heaved the basket up to her hip and walked it over to the others. No flashy effort, no lightening of her load. Just the girl going about her business. _His_ business.

He raised a hand, fingers outstretched. There was a rush in his blood, an eagerness to reach into the Force and bend it to his will. Bend _her_ , too. Take all that blinding light of her and twist it, force the dark cracks wider, until she dimmed.

After a deep breath, Luke dropped his hand. Temptation never completely disappeared, whatever he'd said to reassure others of the opposite in the past. No matter what he'd convinced himself of here on this island. That was all foolish hope. He could see that much now, at least.

He pulled an empty basket free of the pile and reached for the salt. "Here," he said, when Rey turned back to see what he was doing. "You can fit more in if you work inward from the edge."

 

 

 

At first, Luke had found the cramped stone hut a welcome reminder of the past. Every time he knocked his head against the low ceiling, he remembered Yoda, the smell of burning peat, the woody taste of nearly inedible — but filling — stew.

It took only a week before he tore the whole thing down with bare hands and Forced nudges. Rebuilt, it better fit a grown human with enough tender bruises to last a lifetime.

Now, he led Rey past its entrance, and the tunnel opening hidden below the sleeping mat, to the cave she had already explored. Both would lead to the network of tunnels, but Luke preferred to keep whatever secrets as he could.

The fish baskets floated between them, held aloft by both once she'd seen how he did it on his own. The soft brushes of Rey's power against his were like the purrgil. Huge but quiescent, content to keep a distance.

Luke's own senses were in overdrive. He hadn't slept well since her arrival, found it difficult to immerse himself in meditation. She said so little. Gave him a wide berth for the most part. But that relentless brightness... He could see it when he closed his eyes. Felt her burning from the far side of the island. 

At night, he dreamt of his students: pleading, crying, wailing in pain and terrified confusion. When he woke, they stayed with him. They had done for years, but now their shrill voices all carried her name. It took a considerable portion of his energy to keep from hearing them now.

"Han said you came here to find the first temple," Rey said, as they reached the large open space where he stored the equipment she'd found. "I imagined something very different."

"So did I."

When she flashed a grin at him over her shoulder, her teeth were white in the gloom, her eyes lost in her pale face. The distraction splintered her focus and several heavy baskets dipped toward the floor. 

Luke steadied them quickly, then said, without thinking, "Remember, the Force rewards concentration."

The sharp spike of her longing slammed into him with no warning. Luke lost his grip on the baskets he carried, and those between them dropped to the ground with a tremendous crash. It took everything he had to keep them upright, braided seals straining to hold the shifting contents.

How had he forgotten her hunger to learn more? His refusal? This was a road he could not go down again. 

"I knew it!" she was saying, triumph in her voice. "I knew you would agree. There's so much I don't know. So much you can teach me! I can do a little myself, you've seen that."

She ran her hands over a few of the braids, checking their tightness. "Look, we got these this far. How would you lift them up to stack them? Is it the same as floating them, just in a different direction?"

The basket closest to her wobbled into the air. Rey gritted her teeth, but it rose only a few inches then subsided to the ground again. 

She groaned. "I just need some practice. I've been feeling so much stronger here. Is that you? Because of you? Or is it the planet? Is that why the first temple was here?"

Luke held up a hand to stem the tide of questions. Fear started to crawl along his spine. "What do you mean, you feel stronger?"

Rey faltered, her own hand rising to her mouth. "Is that— is that bad? Should I not? It's only that I thought that was the point..." She stammered to a halt. 

It took almost all of Luke's own concentration to keep his eyes from drifting toward the far end of the room, where he had sealed a passageway that led deeper into the core of the island. Down to the true beginning of the Jedi temple, the altar that surrounded the pit he thought of as a Force-well. When he first discovered it, he had nearly been pulled in, almost claimed for its own with seductive glimpses of power and control. Of forgiveness demanded of everyone he craved it from.

It would bring others, he knew. It would bring Snoke, who would destroy the whole galaxy for everything it offered, everything he had no hope of gaining on his own.

The well had been drawing power toward itself for eons. Drawing it ever closer, all those who could feel it, not just this girl who had found his map. Those with the strength to resist learned how to block it out, how to steer out of its way, how to keep it from poisoning them.

This was why he'd chosen this place to wait. For Ben, for a final confrontation, a last chance to sway his nephew back to the right path. One last quest he had no illusions about surviving. Now, with this girl, this shining star, so luminous Luke should have seen her coming from across the galaxy, Ben would find it irresistible.

"It could just be that there's nothing to distract me here, right?" Rey offered. "It's not that— I just need a teacher, someone to show me the ways of the Force."

She grew brighter with every word, hope streaming from her like a sun. But even that wasn't enough to conceal those shadows, those familiar dark stains all over her, like fingerprints. The shadows Luke had recognized from the very first. 

"It could be," he managed to say. 

Rey sagged with relief, and Luke forced himself to smile.


End file.
